James Taylor's Decision Management

I am attending the Brainstorm BPM/SOA/Rules event in Washington DC this week and blogging as I go.

Second on day 2 was Ken Boyd an Enterprise Architect with the FBI with Business Process Management at the FBI. The FBI's approach is to take a systematic, but incremental approach to rethink and redesign business processes within the context of mandates and policies - separate thread to try and change organizations/policies so as not to bog down the process change efforts in the post 9/11 world. FBI also recognized that the Virtual Case File project wasted a ton of money and scrapped the project and is trying to learn from this in its new work. Additionally the FBI is even more regulated and subject to oversight than before and internally it has new needs, especially to prevent not just investigate crime,and has old, legacy, obsolete, siloed and manually intensive systems! When analyzing their processes they found that many of the inefficiencies are policy or oversight driven, making change to these key in their to-be environment where possible.

The initiative is to rethink its business processes to focus on new goals and deliver new approaches, new technologies and new organizations. First steps were to demonstrate executive leadership team/governance and then bring projects together in a business process management office. Focused on the processes that the new case management system (Sentinel) will support. This focus on some of your core processes is a good "best practice", by the way, as these are the process where the ROI comes. Ken presented how the Business Process Management Office worked and clearly the FBI has adopted Gartner/Ken Orr Institute best practices. They had a well defined portfolio approach and have clearly spent some time identifying and streamlining their value chain while fitting it into the architecture approach discussed yesterday. They seem to have done a good job balancing bureaucracy and thoroughness and changing their reputation for "yesterday's technology tomorrow" while, of course, getting less money... Their focus on organizational change, promoting the upside and generally thinking about how to create a willingness to change along with an increased capacity for change acceptance is very appropriate for an organization of their size and complexity.

Interestingly the FBI is using BPMN using System Architect from Telelogic. Mapping this to Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) which sounds interesting but worries me slightly on the rules front as BPMN's support for rules is very weak, as noted by Bruce Silver on his blog. He identified Bizflow and Metastorm as BPM software that the FBI is using but the implication of this talk was that this is mostly about coordinating people and legacy systems with little focus on how to automate more of the decisions within the process. He also did not discuss event processing (CEP) although they are focused on activity monitoring (BAM) across their BPM systems. Wish he had talked more about this as this kind of response-oriented processes seem critical to the FBI.

Technorati Tags: BPEL4WS, BPM, BPMN, BPMS, Business Process Management, government